Before & After : Creative thinking in business

The incident in Boston this week, with those cute little Cartoon Network characters threatening national security, causes me to ask a question: when does creativity go too far?

I’m not sure this instance is a clear case of poor creative judgment around the core idea. 20/20 hindsight certainly tells us the marketing firm hired the wrong morons in Boston to execute their concept (can you hire the right morons?). In a number of other large US cities the same cartoon figures didn’t appear to cause much of a stir. In most cases it seemed more thoughtfulness was used in “product placement.”

As is the focus of this blog, I want to make a distinction between the idea and its execution. I personally think this promotion concept at its core was pretty neat, particularly for this marketer’s target. Executed differently, I believe it could have been quite effective. I suppose, in the spirit of true guerilla marketing, you can’t buy this kind of publicity. But when the execution went overboard that decent creative idea seemed to take the heat.

This whole topic of “going too far” did remind me of an exercise we used to do at my creative camps which we called “toast.” The drill was designed to illustrate exactly what happened here, the consequences of creativity gone bad. (more…)

People often think there’s a lot of mystery around creativity. Great ideas only happen when the stars are in alignment. There are only so many truly great ideas. Only the chosen few are creative. Bunk. Bunk. And bunk.

There are a chosen few, all right. And I think they are the ones perpetuating these myths.

There is a great deal of method to the madness in the world of creativity. Oh, it will never be entirely exact. I mean, we are talking about the human imagination here, right? But there are some parts of the creative process that are actually very exact - quantifiable even.

One of those things is the law of large numbers, or simply put; more is more.

“You mean if I come up with more ideas I’ll have more ideas?”

Exactly.

“Will they all be great ideas?”

Let’s keep talking. (more…)

There’s a segment in Andy Dick’s Bush speechwriter parody right after he pinpoints topics (by throwing darts at stickies with words on them - war, taxes, muffin, etc.) “…then I sleep on them….” he says.

And at that he has the stickies scattered across his bed, then jumps on them in his Uncle Sam boxers, “…and I see what sticks…” only to awake in the morning with Post-its stuck all over his body. Bingo. A speech.

It’s a pretty funny segment in an uproariously funny video. The only part that’s not so funny is that most people aren’t this smart when they approach idea generation or problem solving.

The most prolific idea person in America totally believed in “sleeping on it.” And it led to thousands and thousands of ideas, 1042 of them patent-worthy. (more…)

I hear people say, “break the rules” all the time when talking about creativity. I agree breaking the rules is certainly one of the ways to be creative. You could almost argue, that if you don’t break some rule somewhere, can it really be creative?

But you must be willing to break the ruler as well.

Let me explain by walking you through what happens in a good many of the brainstorming sessions my fellow Before & After creative thinking coaches and I facilitate in the corporate world.

Typically we distill the best, freshest ideas throughout the session, building our consideration set, round by round. At the end of the day we have accumulated a “short” list, which, if we’ve done our job right, is actually rather long. Then we do a final distillation to get to the real short list, the list of take-away ideas.

The problem that too often happens is that when distilling to this final short list, people too frequently forget to break the ruler that measures these rule breaking ideas. So, the effect is that the real new ideas frequently get filtered out in the final screening process. So much for breaking the rules.

New ideas, by definition, are different. New ideas, at least the best ones, often redefine the playing field. But if we don’t redefine the criteria that measures whether an idea is “good” or not, then the final list really can only yield ideas that are acceptable to an old standard.

What we have to do before we disqualify a new idea, that otherwise feels pretty good, is ask ourselves, “by applying current criteria might we be losing ideas that are so new that they simply render the old criteria irrelevant?” Or maybe the better question, “Should we rework the ruler?”

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When it’s time to reinvent something, may I suggest you start with exploring its untributes? This is a very simple way to rethink anything. Just look at what it isn’t.

Let’s look at how this might work in new product development. Start off by listing the attributes of a product. Now, turn them into what I call untributes. Soft becomes not soft. Fast become not fast. Stop becomes don’t stop.

“Stop becomes don’t stop? “ you ask. Maybe I should, uh, stop here, and give an example.

Okay, let’s take brakes on a car. Brakes stop you, right? Brakes that don’t stop you are bad, righter? Well, how about anti-lock brakes. They stop, then they don’t stop, then they stop, then they don’t stop. Get it.

In their desire to make breaks stop better, some engineers likely figured, “well when stopping causes a skid, that’s not good.” (Engineers are really, smart people.) “So, how about if we employ that pumping action that drivers are told to do to prevent skids.” (Growing up with New England winters I learned the ol’ pumping action routine on my tricycle.)

By exploring untributes it opens up a whole wide range of possibilities. In The Do-it-yourself Lobotomy workshop and book we talk about 180° Thinking™ - going in the opposite direction of conventional thinking. 180° Thinking is great at helping people push away from preconceptions in a quick, easy manner.

Well, looking at untributes is a form of 180° Thinking, I suppose, but maybe it’s more of a 359° Thinking thing. Looking in all other directions but the conventional path.

Hot doesn’t necessarily become cold, it simply becomes not hot, which can mean warm, hot only some of the time, hot in only one place, hot during certain times, or warm during those times, but cool, not cold, at other times,…. The possibilities are endless.

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When you lead a group ideation session sometimes it’s good to anticipate the potentially difficult players in advance to head off the problems.There are many types of problem children who could mess up the process. Here I’m going to talk about a group who is not necessarily a problem because they can’t play well with others. But more their presence often presents a problem because of where they are on the org chart, not who they are as individuals.

I’m talking about the big cheeses. The bosses. The heavy hitters.

These are the people who, because of their positions, wield all kinds of influence on the brainstorming process, where they intend to or not. It’s best to handle that potential dysfunction in advance to head off any possible issues before they happen.

Here’s what I do. I call together all persons of rank a few minutes before the actual brainstorming begins and speak to them as a group. I don’t single out anyone. I don’t pull anyone aside individually. I remind them, if they’re not aware, that their very presence in a brainstorming session might put a damper on the process.

I mean, we’re looking for new ideas here, friends. By definition, new ideas are unproven. It’s not easy volunteering a truly new idea in front of the boss, no matter how open a corporate culture might be.

I work with a lot of top executives, and I have to tell you some of the most hollow words in business are “our people are allowed to fail.” Funny, but your people don’t seem to know that.

So in my little pre-brainstorming pep talk I tell these executives, “It’s not you, personally, It’s your position.” Could it be them personally? Sure. But it’s easier to speak to their positions, so it’s not a personal thing.

Here are my simple executive coaching tips:

1) Hold back early - don’t volunteer too many ideas too quickly

2) Don’t judge other’s ideas in the early going

3) When you volunteer an idea, make sure the first one is a little far out

Let’s look at all three little pieces of advice in detail. (more…)